Ottawa-based visual collaboration company Magor Corp. has launched Aerus, which extends its peer-to-peer video collaboration software architecture to the cloud.

According to the vendor, the cloud-based Aerus platform lets people collaborate and communicate by video, including sharing, viewing and editing relevant material on desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, whiteboards and other devices.

By using a scalable distributed server architecture that leverages switched video networking, Magor said Aerus overcomes the limitations of traditional video conferencing implementations that use a centralized architecture. It can also scale more effectively than traditional bridge-based services and better meet the needs of larger deployments that require support for a mix of mobile, desktop and room-based endpoints, said the vendor.

“Our goal with Aerus is to support the many ways people want to work together with video. To do this we chose to deliver an architecture that supports as many different workflows as users want, when users want them, rather than the rigid single workflow model that traditional video conferencing systems box the user into – invite-only, meet-me-on-the-bridge,” said Ken Davison, Magor’s chief marketing officer and senior vice-president of sales, in a statement. “We believe very strongly that Aerus will pave the way to enabling a multitude of video-enabled business processes that have not been addressable with traditional forms of video conferencing.”

Jeff Jedras is a technology journalist with IT World Canada and a member of the IT Business team. He began his career in technology journalism in the late 1990s, covering the Ottawa technology sector for Silicon Valley North and the Ottawa Business Journal. He later covered the technology scene in Vancouver before joining IT World Canada in Toronto in 2005, covering enterprise IT for ComputerWorld Canada and the channel for Computer Dealer News. His writing has also appeared in the Vancouver Sun & the Ottawa Citizen.